Category: Hymns

I am actually quite a bit late with composing something for the Treasury’s New Year, as it has already passed, though not very long ago. But, since tomorrow is secular new year, I suppose it’s not too, too late. ❤

~

O, Apollon, Yours is the coarse wind ripping through the tree branches, bare and clawing at the sky, ripe with the howl of Boreas. You drive a chariot of swift-winged swans, gliding through the air, and You direct the wolves’ hunt below, and the flight of their wily prey.

O, God of terror and beauty, Winter, Your Season, is both beautiful and terrible. Though we in this time may forfeit the knowledge of the true darkness of Winter, we remember traces of fear, deep in our bones.

You, the very darkness, are upon us now, veiled by a shroud of light. Ever growing, it spreads out across the land to awaken the slumbering flora. As time passes, as one Season becomes the next, each day has its turn to hold Your magnificent light. And each day, the light reveals a steadily building heat which soon shall envelope the land, in all its glorious anticipation.

With the warming will come the melted snows, to fill the rivers and streams, and the Spring rains shall seep into the Earth. Moisture is the catalyst, and it will herald the births of the new fauna, as surely as it entices the green-growing things. And all this is possible through You, O God of the liminal, of the sacred transition.

Be You now present as the old year falls away. Be You now the bridge over which we all shall cross. And in time, as the Seasons turn and turn again, may You be the dark embrace of Winter, veiled in light, to brighten our way through each long, cold night.

Hail Lykeios, Wolf-king, O howling wind
Keeping the gate of the beginning and the end,
You who preceed the dawn,O burgeoning light
Herald of the day, and harkener of the night;
With harmonic chords you etherically sing
O light-born, ravenous, all-destroying king.
You who destroy equally the night and day
Each season proceeds from you, birth to decay
That as the sun marks the endless spin of time
So you direct the course of the season’s climb
And the sigh of its decline by your wolf-light
As twilight proceeds the dawn and ushers night.
Hail to you Wolf of the Cosmos, white as the sun
Hail to you, aether-born, Zeus’ golden son!
O bane of the Telchines, fierce one– you rise
As a fiery dancer upon the waves you devise,
The light of solar winds, and bellows of breeze
The life-producing churn of the fruitful seas,
O Lycian lord bear forth your blazing flame
To enrich the soul and burn away the stain;
Before the sparks of your torch all evil flies,
Woe to the corrupt whom your arrows despise,
But joyously greet you the righteous and just,
You who mingles the ashes with the dust.
O Lykeios, dancing on your father’s hand,
Upon us let your rays ever begninantly land.